10 Galleries to Visit Now on the Lower East Side

New York City neighborhoods change; that’s life. And one that has changed drastically is the swath of real estate between 14th Street and Canal Street, east of the Bowery, known as the Lower East Side. Its northernmost section, the East Village, was psychedelia central in the 1960s, and in the early 1980s a hot, if short-lived, art gallery scene.

The whole area, with a history of ethnic diversity and radical politics, had been “Loisaida” to its largely working-class, Spanish-speaking residents. The 1980s art scene lasted just long enough to get the gentrification ball rolling and significantly alter the landscape, not least its ethnic mix. But after a lull, galleries are back, farther south, and lots of them. And a few historical traces of the rich culture of Loisaida hang on.

A portrait of the graffiti artist Michael Stewart is among the works in “La Lucha Continua” at the Loisaida Center.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

LOISAIDA CENTER Although most of the area’s widely seen art of the 1980s was aimed at the mainstream art market, some if it was neighborhood-directed. The exhibition “La Lucha Continua The Struggle Continues, 1985 & 2017,” at the Loisaida Center, documents a monumental piece of that work: a series of 26 murals painted in 1985 and 1986 on the sides of four tenements surrounding an empty lot turned garden called La Plaza Cultural. This was political art in the truest sense, site-specific, topical (its themes included gentrification, immigration and United States intervention in Latin America at the time) by a multicultural group of 34 artists, led by Eva Cockcroft (1936-1999). All but two of the murals are now gone, and those two exist in a vanishing state at the fence-enclosed Plaza Cultural, on East NinthStreet, near Avenue C. But all were extensively documented, while in progress and finished. And the show, meticulously organized and annotated by Jane Weissman of the nonprofit Artmakers Inc., with input from some of the original participants, captures both the project’s vibrant, bigger-than-life look and its spirit, which was very much a product of street wisdom and together-we-can ideals.

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Works by Rainer Ganahl at Kai Matsumiya.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

KAI MATSUMIYA A tradition of political art on the Lower East Side lives on in the work of the Austrian-born New York Conceptualist Rainer Ganahl, who has been responding to current events with antic, deadpan wit for almost 30 years. The work in this packed show, “Legacy: Bush, Obama, Trump,” covers, in its references, roughly half of that time. In a series of ballpoint-pen drawings, he illustrates the phenomenon of combat as made-for-TV spectacle, introduced by George W. Bush, and of drone warfare that was business-as-usual during the Obama administration. More recently, he has made drawings of words that have been Donald J. Trump’s weapon of choice, like “fake news,” in a 1930s German-designed script. The good news, which is also bad news, is that Mr. Ganahl is unlikely ever to run out of fresh material for his art. The show, which has included public readings of Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” will close on May 3 with the release of a related book.

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At Badlands Unlimited, the “New Proverbs Campaign Map.”CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

BADLANDS UNLIMITED This independent publishing company, established in 2010 by the Hugo Boss Prize winner Paul Chan, is staffed entirely by artists: Parker Bruce, Ian Cheng and Ambika Subramaniam, with Micaela Durand as director. It publishes in both digital and analog formats, and has temporarily turned its modest office headquarters into a gallery-like display of one of its more recent products, a line of ready-made protest posters called “New Proverbs.” Rainbow-colored, with eye-socking type, they’re modeled on signs designed and carried by members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. — signs notable for their anti-Semitic and anti-gay-and-transgender content. The Badlands versions change the targets without always diluting the offensiveness. This is instant art-as-politics. Drop by, plunk down your cash and hit the street, ready for a fight.

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Marium Agha’s “A Courtier in Love — A Two Dimensional Portrait” (2015), center, is displayed in the “Archival Alchemy” group show at the Abrons Arts Center.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

ABRONS ARTS CENTER This gallery at the Henry Street Settlement has a long record of nurturing socially conscious art, and sustains it with “Archival Alchemy,” a group show assembled by Saisha Grayson for the 20th anniversary of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective. Much of what’s here is, indeed, archival, in the sense of its recycling material from a near and distant past, as in Maya Mackrandilal’s takeaway photo tributes to historic female activists; Zinnia Naqvi’s real and re-enacted family pictures; and in the binders of the information compiled by Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani on South Asian immigrants reported missing in the United States since Sept. 11. The collective energy here is strong, even when individual entries aren’t easily readable. And one message prevails: The idea of post-identity art is not only undesirable, but it’s also delusional.

STEVEN HARVEY FINE ART PROJECTS Sedrick Huckaby, who lives in Fort Worth, takes his New York solo debut bow with this wonderful show, “The 99%,” and brings much of the population of his African-American neighborhood with him into the limelight. His small oil-on-canvas head-shot paintings of family members are as texturally dense and detail-specific as ancient Egyptian Fayum portraits. In his dozens of lithographic likenesses of hometown friends — he likened the series to a patchwork quilt — the sitters, accompanied by conversational quotations, look casually but distinctly regal. Symbolism enters the work in a paint-caked sculptural tableau about the plague of black incarceration, but politics is really there throughout the exhibition, which feels like a completely realized act of civic and familial devotion.

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A closer look at Steve Keister’s “Stingray” (1986) at an exhibition of Mr. Keister’s works at the Mitchell Algus Gallery.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

MITCHELL ALGUS GALLERY In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Steve Keister’s abstract sculptures were one of the delights of the SoHo gallery scene. Hollow, suspended fiberglass forms, often pointed like projectiles, brought to mind kites and rockets, objects that fell between missiles and toys. He went on to make floor-bound works that repurposed pieces of Modernist furniture as armatures for stretched spandex. For a while he didn’t seem to show much, and when he returned, it was with glazed ceramic pieces cast from plastic foam packing materials assembled to suggest pre-Columbian sculptures: bat gods, monkey gods, jungle cats. In “Post-Columbian,” the mini-survey at Mitchell Algus, we get 1987 and 2017, and they’re both terrific in complementary ways: Abstract meets Aztec, which, of course, happened in an earlier history of Modern art.

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A detail from “Untitled” at the Stephen Irwin exhibition at Invisible-Exports.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS Stephen Irwin, who lived and worked mostly in his birthplace of Louisville, Ky., and died there of chronic heart disease in 2010, at 51, used commercial pornography, gay and straight, as his basic material. Extracting images from magazines, he bleached and sanded the surfaces until the sexual content was reduced to a minimum: A hand reaches out from what looks like a tear in a curtain; a wide patch of white could be sand or skin. The effect is the visual equivalent of hearing the faint sounds of what might, or might not be, lovemaking coming from another room. In this show, titled “Check to see if still dead inside,” it leaves eroticism teasing but unsensational, and may have provided a way for an artist living with a constant threat of erasure to deal with that idea.

REENA SPAULINGS FINE ART There are tons of big, brushy abstract painting around these days, which prompts the question: How satisfying can it be to do warmed-over 1940s Modernism? In a show simply titled “Frank,” work of the Berlin-based artist Michaela Eichwald escapes the trap through force of personality, a willingness to go with oddness. This starts with her choice of support material: fake leather printed with patterns and embossed with puckers. On it she paints — washes, sprays, stains, strokes — and sometimes draws forms that, untranslatably, suggest giant leaves, bloody pools and papal tiaras. That the pictures all date from this year yet don’t look much alike increases the impression that there’s a leaping imagination at work here.

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Lee Relvas’s sculpture reflected in the window glass at Callicoon Fine Arts.CreditMichael Nagle for The New York Times

CALLICOON FINE ARTS The multidisciplinary artist Lee Relvas is, among other things, a performer, and her lithe, openwork sculptures in “Some Phrases,” at Callicoon, give the impression of choreography in progress. Although, at first glance, they look completely organic, like bentwood crafting, they’re made in segments, with lengths of sanded-down plywood joined with epoxy. The curving shapes have a graphic lift, like music notations — unsurprising, given the artist’s parallel career as a singer and composer. She’s a writer, too, and her sculpture gains a lot — a necessary shot of drama — by being viewed through the lens of a short first-person memoir, identified by Ms. Relvas as “a fiction,” that comes as a handout with the show.

BRIDGET DONAHUE The scroll-like, free-hanging paintings of the Chicago-based artist Lisa Alvarado have been most often seen as backdrops for the music group Natural Information Society, for which she plays harmonium. Her recent inclusion in the traveling exhibition “The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now,” has changed that, and in her New York solo debut at Bridget Donahue, “Sound Talisman,” Ms. Alvarado is a painting star.

Her two-sided banners divide the open gallery into chapel-like spaces that sing with color and pattern, channeling Mexican and Tibetan textiles; Anni Albers; and AfriCobra artists like Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth Jarrell and Barbara Jones-Hogu. With their funky luxe, her banners hold their own just fine, though they will again set the scene for music when Natural Information Society’s founder, Joshua Abrams, performs at the gallery on May 8.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C30 of the New York edition with the headline: Embers of a Fiery Collective Spirit. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe